humanist + humorist

Looks like we’ll have to revise the xkcd about “My Hobby: Sitting down with grad students and timing how long it takes them to figure out that I’m not actually an expert in their field.”

The punchline is that you can give literary critics a heap of meaningless nonsense sludge, and they won’t notice! Unlike scientists, who will catch on within minutes if not seconds, because the Hard Facts are so obviously wrong!

Turns out…the scientists will run the meaningless sludge in a “peer-reviewed journal” without even noticing (at least, until the Twitter callouts start):

“From a distance, the anatomical image is clearly all sorts of wrong. But, looking closer only reveals more flaws, including the labels “dissilced,” Stemm cells,” “iollotte sserotgomar,” and “dck.”“

Meanwhile, the actors hired last-minute for the ill-fated “Willy Wonka Experience” noticed immediately that they had been handed a pile of sludge. They weren’t hired to be editors or improvisors, just to read lines, but they went above-and-beyond running interference trying to make it more passable:

One of the Wonkas: “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things. […] I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said, ‘yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise’. So I started to cut things out, thinking that would be silly.”

One of the Oompa-Loompas: “I kind of thought it was AI-generated, but by this point I’d signed the contract. […] I was like, I don’t know if I actually want to do this. But I’d signed the contract, and part of me didn’t want to disappoint the kids going to this. Honestly, it was bad enough. I knew it was shocking, but I know I’m good at what I do, so I was like, If I can bring a wee bit of something good to this …”

And another: “We are experienced working with children so we were just trying to make it as fun as possible for them. It was really difficult, there was children coming in with birthday badges, some dressed up as little Willy Wonkas, they were just so excited coming in and we had to be like ‘sorry this is it’.”

Slacktivist comes out of the woodwork to write up some background on the organizer’s other AI-fueled scams, and dissect the failures of the “script” from the perspective of A Guy Who Has Done Community Theater.

(Clearly, the Red Dwarf gold-standard for bot-created artwork is still a long way off.)